Monitoring alpine glacier activity by a combined use of terrasar-x images and continuous gps measurements - the argentière glacier experiment

The monitoring of Alpine glacier activity is one of the applications which require the combined use of ground measurements and SAR data. It should become feasible thanks to the new generation SAR satellites (ALOS, TerraSAR-X, Cosmo-SkyMed and RadarSAT-2) and the high precision GPS measurements. This paper presents the early results of an experiment which started in 2007 on Argentière glacier (Mont-Blanc area) and includes a moving corner reflector (CR) oriented for TerraSAR-X acquisitions, SAR images where this CR is visible and 3 continuous GPS stations providing the CR position and information on the tropospheric path delay corrections.